Month: April 2015

Game of Thrones Theories and a Writing Exercise

Posted on by Jonathan Fesmire

 

Learning from Fan Theories

 

As writers, I think we often have a clear idea of how our own novels are going to end. If we’ve done our job right, we’ve worked in some twists that most readers won’t catch until the story has reached its climax. If we write anything like George R.R. Martin writing Game of Thrones, the ending may seem totally unexpected until we look back over clues that he planted in the series from the beginning.

Like most Game of Thrones fans, I have my ideas on how the series will end. I’m probably wrong, because my ideas are pretty simple, and Martin isn’t the type of writer to go with the obvious. Having read the books just once, I know I’ve missed many of the subtle clues. Time permitting, I’d like to go back and read them again.

As writers, we may not see all the possible ways our stories could go. I can illustrate that by sharing two Game of Thrones fan theory videos. Each is well-thought-out and contains good arguments for why the YouTuber thinks that the series will end a certain way. Also, each theory is completely different from the other.

 

Enchantment of Eternity’s Theory

 

I’ll start with Predictions: How Game of Thrones Will End by Enchantment of Eternity. I realize these videos are long. I am including them if you would like to watch, but will sum up the content of each for your convenience.

If you haven’t watched the series through season 4, then spoiler alert. If you have, then you can read ahead. When you watch the videos, pay attention to the spoiler alerts contained therein.  

The gist of Enchantment of Eternity’s theory goes like this. The three heads of the dragon are Daenerys, Jon Snow, and Tyrion, and all three of them are Targaryens. All three will die fighting the white walkers on the dragons. Stannis will defeat the Boltons, find Rickon Stark, and make the boy the Warden of the North, though Stannis will later die. Sansa become queen of Westeros and sit on the Iron Throne. EoE also predicts that the dragons will die, and that all magic will leave the world.

The video goes into much more detail, but those are the basics: Sansa on the throne, and magic leaving the world. EoE gives makes a good argument for each point and backs a lot these ideas up with hints from the books and TV series.

 

 

Red Team Review’s Theory

 

This video, by Red Team Review, also predicts how GoT will end. However, the theory is very different from EoE’s, and lacks some of the bigger world changes.

RTR does go into detail on some other characters, but here are the highlights. Stannis will turn against and possibly kill Melisandre, dying in the process. Aria will become a Faceless Man, but will leave the Faceless Men and go rogue, retaining her own identity and assassinating whomever she wants. Tyrion will become Lord of Casterly Rock. Daenerys will return to Old Valeria and find a collection of petrified dragon eggs.

This theory doesn’t go into big details, like the EoE theory. Who will sit on the Iron Throne? What will become of Westeros? Well, he does hint at one big possibility: that Daenerys will wake many more dragons, flooding the world with magic. That, essentially, is the opposite of how EoE predicts the series ending.

Check out Red Team Review’s video for his arguments and details.

 

 

What do I think of these theories? The idea of Sansa becoming Queen of Westeros seems quite far-fetched, even the way that EoE predicts it could happen, and I don’t think such and ending would feel satisfying. RTR’s prediction that Daenerys will find more dragon eggs seems too fanciful, for two reasons. First, it’s predicated on the idea that Daenerys turns down the Iron Throne. Second, George R.R. Martin has said that her wakening her three dragons was a one-off, a unique magical event. I also find it unlikely that magic will completely leave the world, though EoE’s reasoning is good on this point. That idea has been played out in other series, including Lord of the Rings, so I think that Martin will do something different.

 

A Writing Exercise

 

Take a story you’ve written or one you’re working on. If you’re not working on a story right now, think of one you already write. This can be anything from a short story to a novel. You may already know how you plan for it to end. You may have planned for the ending already, meticulously inserting clues into the story.

Now, get a note pad and a pen or pencil. I don’t recommend doing this sort of brainstorming on a screen; this is far too free-flowing to work very well on digital media.

You’re going to come up with alternate ways your story might end. This exercise is not necessarily meant to change your plan, though it could! It’s meant to help you think in different directions and to see new possibilities.

Here are some ways to approach this exercise. You can try as few as one, or as many as all of them.

 

  • Write the name of a major character on the top of the paper. Underneath, write ideas for what might happen to that character, or what sort of trouble he might get into.

  • Write a title for a major event in the story, and underneath, what the fallout of that event could be. For example, “Bill ransacks Jim’s apartment” or “The gum factory burns down.” What are the possible consequences?

  • Think of an upcoming decision a character or organization has to make. Write down the possible choices, and then write notes on how each choice would likely turn out.

  • Jot down some of the major clues you’ve planted in the book. How might readers interpret them incorrectly? How might the story turn out if their incorrect interpretations were actually correct?

 

I think that has probably given you enough to think about and enough to do for now! When it comes to writing, there are learning opportunities everywhere.

 

Note

 

If you haven’t read A Song of Ice and Fire, I highly recommend it! You can get the boxed set here, or browse Amazon to get each book separately.

“Either write someting worth reading or do something worth writing.” –Benjamin Franklin.

 

Novel Writing: Plow Through or Plan Ahead?

Posted on by Jonathan Fesmire

Writing Schools of Thought

 

I’ve noticed two major schools of thought in novel writing. The first is having a basic plan for a story and plowing ahead from beginning to end. The second is planning meticulously ahead. Of course, these are two ends of a spectrum. In this post I discuss them both, and explain what I think works best. This is a bit of a long post, so if you’re short for time, look down to the bulleted list that outlines how I recommend writing a novel.

 

Plowing Through

 

I’ve seen this method advanced by creator of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), Chris Baty. As I understood it, his book No Plot? No Problem! holds that you can create a few characters and a rough idea of the story you want to tell, then just write it by sheer force of will. This book suggests that all humans are born storytellers, and that if you just keep writing, everything will work out. He even suggests that this method is “low stress.” Once you get that first draft done quickly, you’ll have a novel to revise and perfect.

 

 

Let me fill you all in a bit more on NaNoWriMo. It is a worldwide competition of sorts held every year in November. Those who enter the competition write a novel over the course of one month. The usual word count goal is 50,000. If you reach that goal and haven’t finished your first draft, you still won.

Baty himself did this with little writing experience and wrote a novel in a month. And honestly, I don’t mean to disparage him at all. He started NaNoWriMo, which has been helpful for many authors. I have a lot of friends who have participated, and I participated one year myself. (2020 Update: I’ve participated twice.)

 

Writer’s Block

 

The problem with this approach is that it’s a recipe for writer’s block. The biggest cause of this affliction is not knowing what you’re going to write about ahead of time.

Think about when you were a kid and had to write a paper for a class. You sit down to start it, and have no idea of what to say. You think that the problem is that you need to write a good first sentence, but it won’t come to you! A lot of teachers and parents seem under this delusion as well, and try to help students by taking a “one sentence at a time” approach. This was agonizing for me, and I imagine it was for just about everyone else.

Then, at some point, if you had a good writing teacher, you learned about brainstorming. You wrote the topic of your essay on a piece of paper and wrote down any related ideas that came to you. If you were supposed to write about Gandalf from The Hobbit (I envy anyone who actually got an assignment like this), you wrote “Gandalf” on the paper. You might have jotted down words like, “grey wizard,” “big hat,” “helpful,” and “wanders around.” The more words you wrote, the more ideas you had. Next, you organized those ideas and came up with what you wanted to say in your essay, and in what order.

At that point, your writer’s block was gone. You wrote your essay. Of course, you then had a lot of revising to do, but you had all your thoughts on paper (or on your computer) and could get it done in time.

On the off chance that you never learned this method, now you know it! Use it from now on.

 

Plan Ahead

 

This brings us to our second school of thought, which is to plan everything in advance. With this, you create your characters, create a detailed world, and meticulously plot your entire book, chapter by chapter. Note that “create a detailed world” can mean a completely new setting, like a fantasy world or a science fiction future, or it can mean creating the major settings where your book will take place in the real world.

I’m sure you can see the problem with this already. It’s too much planning! Fiction has a certain spontaneity to it. Characters often don’t want to go in the direction we planned for them. When this happens, it’s your subconscious saying to you, “I understand this character, and he wouldn’t do what you’re trying to make him do. Think about this a bit.” That grinds writing to a halt, and forces the writer to go back to find out where the story took a wrong turn.

 

Plan Ahead Wisely

 

Now, planning ahead is great. Knowing your characters, your world, and what kind of trouble they’re about to get into can keep you writing briskly every day. You need to plan ahead wisely, which means not plotting out all the details in one go.

Here’s the methodology I suggest based on my reading and experience.

 

  • Come up with a great idea, which can start with a setting, a character, or an event.

  • Create your cast of characters, especially the protagonist and antagonist.

  • Write out a basic plot outline about a page long. If you need to, do some brainstorming first for ideas. Based on the characters, what likely conflicts are likely to emerge?

  • Expand that to several more pages, if you like.

  • Take the first bit of your plot outline and expand it. Try to plan out the first three or four chapters.

  • Now, before you write your first scene or chapter, expand that. This type of writing may look something like this. “Meg enters her new office to find Bill sitting at her desk. She’s puzzled and annoyed, so she asks him to leave. Bill says he will after in just a minute; he’s putting the finishing touches on his presentation. Bill is at the same level as her but has been there longer, and she sees this as his way of intimidating her.  She reminds Bill that he has his own office, but he says IT is working on his computer.”

  • Write the scene or chapter.

  • Once you have done this with the first few chapters, go back to step 5, but for the next few chapters.

 

Much of this I worked out for myself years ago. When I wrote Children of Rhatlan in 1998, I sketched a detailed outline of each chapter before writing the actual chapter. This allowed me to be in touch with my characters’ motives and to work out all conflicts ahead of time. That done, typing up the chapter came quickly, because I wasn’t sitting there squeezing every word out of my brain, figuring out character motivations and actions as I went.

 

 

More recently I read a terrific book by Rachel Aaron called 2,000 to 10,000. This gem costs just $0.99 for Amazon Kindle and is terrific. It reiterated all this to me and reminded me just how important it is to novel writing. Using this technique, Aaron went from writing, yes, 2,000 to 10,000 words per day. I can’t recommend her book highly enough.

So, that is essentially how I recommend going about novel writing. This technique works great for NaNoWriMo, too, because by giving yourself time to pre-write every chapter, you make it possible to write the actual chapter very quickly. It also keeps the outline loose enough for approaching chapters that you can modify or completely change it as you go.

There’s one more piece of the puzzle, one I myself am still working on, and that is to keep moving forward.

 

Don’t Look Back

 

This has been the toughest thing for me to learn, and is likely why my own novel writing tends to slow down around the middle. Oh, I eventually get the book done, but I need to work on getting my stories done faster.

In fact, I had a dream the other night that I had written a few books from beginning to end, using the “Plowing Through” method, and published them. I remember that they were crazy stories, but wanted to go back and revise and re-publish them. Then, I woke up and remembered that I hadn’t written them at all. I felt a loss.

 

 

Then, I saw this picture posted on Facebook, with a quote by Joshua Wolf Shenk. It’s what prompted me to write this post.

On the chance you can’t read the graphic, it says, “Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.”

I fell into this same trap after writing the first third of Bodacious Creed. Now, fortunately, I didn’t do a ton of rewriting on that first third. I made a few changes since, by writing it, I understood the world and the characters better. Still, it held me back from continuing on to the next third.

I still haven’t finished the novel! I’d estimate that I’m about halfway done now, with really exciting stuff coming up that I want to write about, but just haven’t gotten to. It’s because I still have the notion sitting there in the back of my mind that it needs to be good the first time around. Shenk is right. To paraphrase, have the courage to write a crappy first draft.

What I should have done is taken notes on the changes I wanted to make, and gone on with the story as if I had made the changes already. That’s what I recommend. It’s what I will do from now on. It would make reading the first draft very confusing to anyone else, but so what? I’m not handing it out yet.

Keep using the methodology I laid out in “Plan Ahead Wisely” until the first draft is done. Write notes about what you would like to change later along the way. The first big accomplishment in writing a book is having a first draft.

Once that’s done, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to make story changes to bring everything together. As Shenk said, you’ll know the shape of the thing.

 

Your Grain of Salt

 

I hope you will take this to heart, especially if you’re fairly new to writing, or generally struggle with your novels. However, while I believe the techniques I’ve outlined will work for most writers, some authors work very differently. I believe that the end of a story should arise organically from everything that came before. Some writers start with the end and write backward, and somehow make the end work perfectly. For me, plowing ahead without any foresight, or sticking too rigidly to an outline that doesn’t work for the characters, will cause writer’s block. Some writers can both plow ahead and force their characters to stay in line. They can always change the characters in the next draft.

The more you write, the more you’ll learn what works for you. So, take this all with a proverbial grain of salt. I might also save you months or years.

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pretchett

 

Writers, Mix It Up!

Posted on by Jonathan Fesmire

 

Creativity is funny, in that it gets influenced by everything. We writers and artists of all types get ideas and draw new connections between things we take in all the time. But right now, I’m talking about the actual creative environment, what it’s like around you when you’re drawing, painting, writing, or whatever you do.

Some writers prefer to work in complete silence. Some can work just fine in a busy café, which is why so many of us do that. (And you thought it was just to look pretentious… no, there’s something stimulating about that atmosphere, beyond just the coffee.) Some can listen to music which becomes their own personal soundtrack for a creative project.

Honestly, speaking strictly about my writing, all of those work for me at different times. The trick is shifting your mind into a different space where writing becomes easy. It’s about moving out of our usual thinking mode into a higher, focused thinking that allows the writing to flow. Some techniques that have worked well for me include writing in vi, the Unix “visual editor” text program that allows you to easily jump from one section of a file to another, move around chunks of text, and generally feel like you have wizard-level powers over whatever you’re typing. Writing in different fonts can shift the mind, too. I sometimes like writing using the Royal Pain font, which looks like you’re using a faulty typewriter.

 

What I like most about Royal Pain is that its typography screams “first draft!” It’s a visual reminder as you work that what you’re typing doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, it can be rough and crappy, because there will always be time to revise and turn it into Times New Roman later.

What got me thinking about all this was finding a link to Qwerky Toys yesterday. (I would have called the company Qwerty Toys, but that’s just me.) I learned to type on both mechanical and electronic typewriters, right around when the early home computer, the Coleco Adam, came out. That was in 1983. Yes, I’m dating myself, and I don’t care. Don’t you want your writers to have some life experience?

Starting on those old typewriters, I got used to the distinct click of keys. The look and feel of working on a typewriter is different. Writing on one seems to give weight to every letter. Honestly, I think it would be fun to use one again, even with the pain (the royal pain?) of getting to the end of a line, hearing the “ding,” then sending the carriage to the beginning of the next.

The Querky Keyboard simulates the look and feel of a mechanical keyboard (I assume the feel, anyway, as I haven’t actually used this keyboard). If you’ve got the money and the retro sensibilities, you might want to check it out. You can use it with PC, Mac, and Android devices. I thought it was for USB, but it looks like it uses Bluetooth.

 

The thing is, it’s really expensive. I usually get my keyboards for between $10 and $15. This baby will lower your bank account by $309. If it came down in price by quite a bit, I’d likely get one. Honestly, I was hoping for different colors, and maybe one with a wooden exterior, something with a killer steampunk look.

Typing sounds though! Those clicks and dings are still fun. They can get your mind into a new space and shake up your writing. I tried a couple of programs that will play typewriter sounds while you’re writing on your computer. The one that worked for me, and that I quite like, is Qwertick. I’m using it now, and it is pretty nice. I won’t use it all the time, but I think that the next time I work on Bodacious Creed, I’ll give it a try.

I hope this blog entry gave you some ideas on getting your mind into a different, perhaps more productive, space for your writing. Go have fun with these suggestions!

“Actual conversation is still okay… to a writer who types all day, texting is like never leaving work.”
― Nyki Mack